Lightkeeper

Short Story | 2200 Words | When secrets awash upon a remote Canadian island

Heather shivers underneath her denim, cursing her own foolishness. Denim’s no good for the cold, but all the other clothes she had brought with her had turned stiff, their linings crusted with salt. She’d found this over-sized jean jacket hanging up in the storeroom her first day on the island, and in the two months since, nobody had ever moved it.

She sets the elongated contraption of death beside her – damn Rowan insists she takes the bugger everywhere – and flicks her lighter, huddling into herself as she tries to get it to ignite. The fuel’s going; the sparks that had once been wild and uncontainable now barely sputtering out from the flint.

The bitter wind mocks her, whistling through the encircling metal bars to play with her, teasing like a lover who’s denied you too long. Another full-body shiver causes her thumb to slip just as a tiny spark catches. It dies in the howl.

“Use the flame.”

Heather swivels, scuffed boots squeaking against corrugated metal. The horizon of angry black sea turns into a pale, freckled face.

“The hell are you on about?” Heather grumbles, chewing at the end of her unlit cigarette. “Whad’ya think I’m trying to do?”

Mrs Byrne tsks. She steps closer to Heather, the wind conceding at her approach like a bitch called to heel. Heather doesn’t move, not even as Mrs Byrne leans past her, arm brushing against her shoulder as she squeaks open the glass shielding the lighthouse’s brazier.

Heat floods through her. Heather shifts, spinning to press her arm against Mrs Byrne’s in the guise of steadying herself as she dips her other hand down to the flame licking upwards.

She studies Mrs Byrne as she dangles the cigarette.

Presumably there had been a Mr Byrne at one point, but there’s no sign of him, other than this jean jacket. If Mrs Byrne is bothered by Heather’s wearing of it, she makes no mention of it.

Mrs Byrne had put out the advert in the Vancouver Sun a few months back, seeking someone to help her tend to the lighthouse over the lengthening winter nights. Heather, enticed by the promise of free room and board, and the assuring ‘No experience needed!’, had carefully clipped out the advert and mailed in a lengthy note to Mrs Byrne.

“I’ve got nothing tying me down, Ma’am, no family to tend to and no desire to start one just yet. I’d be yours the whole winter if you’ll take me.”

When she had met Mrs Byrne, the woman was much younger than she’d expected, just a year or so on her, awful young to be a widower, though Mrs Byrne seems to get a kick out of pretending otherwise. Regardless, Heather had kept her questions to herself. Mrs Byrne commands a certain respect, even from someone like Heather who thinks respect ought to be hard-earned.

A gust of wind rattles through them, bowing the flame to its force. But the fire is resilient, and recovers quickly, rearing its head to bite back, blackening the tips of Heather’s fingers.

The lighthouse tends to itself mostly. It had only ever gone out once, Mrs Byrne claims, the winter prior.

“Hurry up, girlie,” Mrs Byrne says, her red hair illuminated by the tungsten glow.

The ember wisps lick upwards, trying to get a taste of Heather’s flesh, and she steels herself before pushing her hand further still. Finally, the cigarette catches, tobacco smoke rising around her.

She sucks in a drag, other hand adjusting her toque to cover her frost-bitten ears. “Why’s anyone shipping in this weather beats me,” she mutters, then offers the cigarette out to Mrs Byrne. “Fill your boots.”

Instead of taking it from her hand, Mrs Byrne tilts her head, and Heather rolls her eyes but feeds it to her anyway. Her pointer and index kiss Mrs Byrne’s lips as she sucks in acrid smog. When she exhales, Heather presses the cigarette back to her own mouth, and peers through the metal bars down at the scene below.

The swell pushes up against the rocky seawall and sloshes onto the land. It’s higher than Heather’s ever seen it – a king tide, brought on by the moon’s perigree.

Mrs Byrne claps her hands on Heather’s shoulders, more warmth seeping through the denim at her solid touch, steering her towards the stairwell. “Enough, keener. Shift’s over. And put on something warmer, for feck’s sake.”

Heather stifles a laugh at Mrs Byrne’s odd accent – somewhere in between Canadian and Irish – and flashes her a two-fingered salute.

She takes the spiral steps two at a time. Already, she’s imagining what she’ll find stranded on the island today. King tides had a habit of remaking the world anew, washing up secrets that ought to have been buried and taking away things you’d have rather liked to keep.

Before coming here, before finding Mrs Byrne, Heather had been a seacomber.

A vagrant, the law had insisted, but a seacomber nonetheless.

Vancouver’s sheltered beaches were vastly different to the isolated island she’s on now, though – has to be, since she’s two hours off the coast of British Columbia in Mrs Byrne’s sanctuary.

Those beaches back home gifted her all sorts of finds. Bits of plastic, mostly, a couple coins here and there, and once, very memorably, a walkman, although it hadn’t been working. Her past self had salvaged them, kept them in her little tent, not wanting the tide to take them away, but admiring the ocean’s hunger regardless.

The sea remembers all things left behind.

Only one part of Mrs Byrne’s island has a seawall, fringing around the lighthouse to protect its cliffs from erosion. To the east, sharp rocks swarm the perimeter, ready to swallow anything daft enough to fall in.

Heather keeps her distance, heading west through overgrown wildgrass, tinged brown by their frostbite. Every few seconds, the sweep of the lighthouse’s beam spotlights her way, letting her jump over clumps of wet grass and surprise depressions in the earth. Hardly any of the island is paved, aside from the area surrounding Mrs Byrne’s cottage, leading to a tiny cemetery with a handful of tombstones.

Heather doesn’t ask Mrs Byrne why her son’s there, but not her husband.

It takes her a miserable, damp hour to get to the western beach. By then, the tide has relented somewhat. Each wave’s crash laps further and further backwards, revealing more of its pale underbelly like a shy virgin sliding off a shimmering, blue-black skirt.

Heather hops in and out of the narrow beam of light, plucking things from the wet sand. She gathers some smoothed seaglass, letting them tumble into her pocket. Spots pieces of dead coral, bleached white, ribbed with the impressions of the life it had once supported. And something else, too, something that sticks out the sand.

Heather pauses. She prods it with her boot, and it rolls over. Its tongue lolls out of its mouth, playing dead in the hopes that Heather will move on. Its skin has been eaten away by the sea’s alkalinity, and its extremities have long-since frayed away. She looks for its mirrored twin for two sweeps of the lighthouse’s ray, but there’s only one.

One old shoe, sent awash.

Heather’s always been a firm believer in ghosts and the supernatural, so much so that it had taken her some time to stop spooking at the sighs and rustling of the old lighthouse. So, when the anxiety within her tells her that this is a bad omen, she believes it. She backs away from the shoe, eyeing it, and hedges further up the beach.

The sweep of light illuminates her patch of sand, creating a glowing path to something else, rolling in on a wave. She thinks at first that it’s a ball by the way it bounces in the froth, but there’s something wrong in the way it tumbles. It’s weighted weird, and it tilts to the right.

The tide belches it up on the sand and it settles, put to rest against the sand, empty eye-sockets facing upwards.

A scream rips itself from Heather’s throat as she trips in her haste to flee. She scrambles backwards, trying to put distance between herself and the skull, but the next wave washes in further than the last and rolls it closer.

The lighthouse’s beam sweeps back to her. The skull’s got a wide fissure in the back of its head, black and cavernous the second after the light passes over it. Hands grip the sand, clenching loose grit as she tries to get her terrified mind to think.

The skull watches her, accusing with its eyes of nothing.

There’s not a policeman on this island. There’s only her, Mrs Byrne, and the handful of fishermen who trade things with them from time to time. None of whom would be here now – no one in British Columbia is daft enough to send their little tinnies out in this storm.

And what if Mrs Byrne doesn’t believe her?

Cursing, Heather pulls the denim sleeves over her trembling hands and scoops up the skull, cradling it close to her. She has to show it to Mrs Byrne, and she doesn’t trust it, leaving it here on this beach, lest some overzealous wave steal it away again.

In her hands, its lighter than she had imagined. She turns it over, running her hand over the hole at the back. It’s the length of her thumb, edges jagged as if a great force shot through it.

She stumbles back east, tripping in snareweeds and shadowpits, eyes transfixed on the steady glide of the light beam. Her body shakes as the skull forms a wet patch against her. In her ear, whispers of the night call to her, taunting her, unsettling her with every rustle and howl.

Out of the gloom, a great almagation of concrete and wood arises, its golden top signalling safety. She flings open the old door, then slams it shut behind her, the poor thing rattling on its rusted hinges as she pushes upwards.

Around and around she goes, climbing the staircase into the sky, until finally the ceiling opens to the top of the lighthouse. Mrs Byrne hasn’t noticed her yet, her speedy ascent masked by the storm’s co-conspiring. Mrs Byrne’s watching the ocean for signs of trouble, hand resting on her shotgun.

Heather pauses. She’d forgotten that she’d left it there, had forgotten Mrs Byrne’s strict instructions that she take it with her wherever she went, had forgotten that when she first came to the island, Old Fisher Jim had offered to get her “some means of protection if that Byrne’s still around.”

Had forgotten that, as she assured him that she could handle Mrs Byrne, Old Fisher Jim only calls Mrs Byrne Rowan when they trade at the docks.

“Mrs Byrne.”

Mrs Byrne doesn’t turn. She stands, forever on guard, hyperaware of how the ocean can give as much as it can take.

“Back already, girlie? Doing my head in, I tell you. You don’t get paid more for extra shifts.”

She drifts forward, battling against the wind. No, it warns her, for once, let it rest. It snags in her jacket, sliding it down her shoulders so it pools around her waist, held in place by her arms still looped through its sleeves.

Heather raises the skull forward before she can think better of it, even as mind starts to connect dots she’d rather stay far, far apart. Mrs Byrne head turns, just slightly, and she catches sight of the pale moon in Heather’s hands.

Mrs Byrne stays silent.

Heather takes a cautious step closer. When Mrs Byrne doesn’t so much as twitch, just stares at her, unimpressed, Heather closes the gap between them. Their shoulders find each other, feeding on each other’s heat, on their mutual understanding.

“You don’t seem surprised.”

Mrs Byrne shrugs, plucking the skull from Heather’s grasp. She twirls it around to stare into its eyes. Mrs Byrne’s always dismissed Heather’s belief in ghosts, mocked her for it, some days, but now she looks like she’s seeing something that isn’t there, too. Her mouth takes on a sad twist, a soft exhale escaping her.

“Not much to look at, is he?”

Heather tilts her head. She’d expected to feel fear, to hate the way Mrs Byrne’s other hand holds the shotgun upright against the ground, to fear that one day she’d leave the lighthouse and end up with a matching fissure in the back of her skull.

But Heather knows Mrs Byrne’s a lot of things – a cheat at Scrabble, a human furnace, a terrible storyteller who weaves tales of ghosts just to get a rise out of Heather – and not once has she ever been a threat.

“Found his shoe too, I think. Almost scared me more than the skull.”

Mrs Byrne huffs out a breath and sets Mr Byrne on the ground next to her. She turns back towards the ocean. “Damn king tides. Least I only have to worry about ‘em once a year.”

“Could try your luck again,” Heather suggests, her left hand resting on the railing. There’s barely a centimetre between it and Mrs Byrne’s right. They pretend to look at the sea together. “I’d have to come back, of course. To see if he washes up next winter.”

From the corner of her eye, she watches Mrs Byrne’s eyebrows climb high on her forehead. Mrs Byrne coughs, as if that will hide the upwards twitch of her lips. Their pinkies slide along the metal, meeting in the middle to rest skin against skin.

“Next year, then,” Mrs Byrne echoes. “To see if this one sticks.”